Laboratory of life-cycle psychology and neuroscience

Laboratory of life-cycle psychology and neuroscience

Background

Psychological functioning of human beings continues to develop and change over the life course. Previous research in psychology and neuroscience has revealed how cognitive, motivational, and affective factors influence these developmental changes. However, there has been decided lack of research that examine how these factors interact with each other to jointly influence human’s developmental processes. Curiosity, for example, is one critical motivational factor that supports the developmental change of cognitive functioning, illustrating the crossroad of cognition and motivation in human development. Some research also revealed that the development of human emotions is closely tied to the executive functioning, underscoring the importance of emotion regulation. The purpose of our laboratory is to reveal how the key components of human psychological processes, such as learning, executive functioning, metacognition, emotion, reward processing, intrinsic motivation, and sociability, interact with each other to jointly contribute to human’s life-cycle development.

Specific aims
  1. We examine how human curiosity influences decision making and learning and its underlying psychological and neural processes
  2. We examine how individuals regulate emotion and how the emotion regulation process is affected by ageing.
  3. We examine the effects of social network on our belief about others.
  4. Using longitudinal survey and experiment, we examine how schoolchildren’s emotion and motivation change during adolescence and influence their cognitive functioning

Notes
Our laboratory encourages researchers to engage with interdisciplinary and international research collaborations beyond the areas of psychology and neuroscience. These areas include biology, computational science, statistics, network science, educational science, and gerontology.

Member
Kou Murayama Visiting Associate Professor
Michiko Sakaki Visiting Researcher

Cooperating Member
Naoto Nakamura Professor
Takashi Suzuki Associate Professor
Tatsuya Murakami Assistant Professor